Someone Perfect (Westcott Book 10)

by Mary Balogh

  “Though I do hate to set the law on Ricky, as though he were a common criminal,” Estelle overheard him saying to his uncle, Mr. Sharpe. “I really do not know if he would look upon constables and sheriffs as friends or see them as threats.”

  “If they can but find him, Justin,” his uncle said, patting his shoulder and then squeezing it, “we or his brother will soon be able to reassure him.”

  At the end of a busy day they were all weary. Nevertheless, everyone at the dinner table wanted to tell one another about their experiences, about what they had said and what the people to whom they had said it had had to say in return.

  “I was very proud of Wallace, I must say, even if he is my brother and a whole sixteen months younger than I am,” Gillian Chandler told them all, grinning impishly at that young man. “Even when a few men at one tavern where we stopped jeered at him for ordering lemonade, he was not bothered. ‘I am seventeen,’ he told them. And when they laughed and nudged one another after we had told them about Ricky because we spoke in Yorkshire accents and were all upset over a man from the lowest of low classes who was also simple in his head— those were their words— Wallace stood up and looked them all in the eye, including the landlord himself, and said, ‘Do those facts make him less of a human being? Do they make him less worthy of love and care?’ And they did not know what to say.”

  “Gill!” Her brother blushed mottled shades of scarlet. “They were laughing at me.”

  “But they did not know what to say,” she said.

  “Thank you both,” the Earl of Brandon said. “Thank you especially, Wallace. It was brave of you to speak up in the face of ridicule. But you can be sure that if any of those men should by chance set eyes upon Ricky, they will know instantly who he is and see to it that he is brought here. People are not always as heedless or as heartless as they pretend to be.”

  “I am proud of you too, son,” Mr. Chandler said, beaming. “That lad will not be able to set one toe over the border into Hertfordshire without being spotted.”

  “My main fear, though,” the earl said, “is that he is not headed this way. There could be nothing rational about his travel plans, after all, assuming that his desire to find me really is the reason for his disappearance. He might well be wandering about Wales at this moment or heading for the Lake Country or merely moving in circles, unable to find his way forward or back.”

  He looked directly at Estelle for a moment and she saw utter bleakness in his eyes. Or he might well be dead, that look seemed to say.

  “He will find his way,” she said. “Either back to his brother’s house or here.”

  Soon after, Maria got to her feet to lead the ladies from the dining room and leave the men to their port.

  “Brandon,” she said before she went. “May I have a word with you later? In my sitting room? Perhaps Lady Estelle will come there with me. Perhaps Viscount Watley will come with you.”

  There was an unnatural silence for a few moments while everyone looked at her in collective surprise, the earl included.

  “Of course,” he said then. “Aunt Augusta, perhaps you would preside over tea in the drawing room after the men join you there? Maria, perhaps you would give the order to have a tea tray delivered to your sitting room in … half an hour’s time?”

  She inclined her head and swept from the room, trailed by all the ladies.

  Seventeen

  I spoke with the Cornish aunts and uncles this afternoon after we had all returned from our visits,” Maria told Estelle while they waited in her sitting room for the two men to join them.

  “Yes,” Estelle said. “You were even laughing with them when I saw you. I do admire the way you are going about getting to know all your relatives. You are forcing the issue with each group of them and showing a strength of character I always knew you had. Bertrand and I are happy to be here, but you really do not need us, I have been happy to observe.”

  Maria was fussing with the folds of the curtains, which had already been drawn across the window when they came here. She turned to look at Estelle.

  “Oh, there you are wrong,” she said. “You have no idea how lonely and even frightened I have been feeling, Estelle. Although I am related to almost everyone here, they are all strangers. They all hated my mother— or so she believed. I assumed they all hated me too, or at least were not interested in claiming me as one of their own. Yet they all came here when they were invited. Even Aunt Sarah, who might have used her plans to go to Scotland as an excuse to avoid me, wishes to come later. The others have all come and have been … amiable. Just as I have been in return. But amiability was not going to be enough.”

  “No,” Estelle said.

  “I needed to know why none of them have been in my life until now,” she said. “I needed to know what their relationship with my mother was and why everyone quarreled with her— or she with them. I needed to know how they felt about me, my mother’s daughter. I have provoked those conversations. No one bears any grudge against me, Estelle. And I bear none against any of them. I really like having cousins who are close to me in age. I believe some of them, perhaps even most, will be real friends even after they have gone home. We will be able to write to one another. Some of them want me to visit them. I think some will visit me here again. And my aunts and uncles, even Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe, who are now Uncle Rowan and Aunt Betty, have affection to give. It makes me happy. I have always envied you your large extended family and all the things you do with them.”

  “I am happier for you than I can say,” Estelle said, smiling at her. “You have been very brave in taking the initiative as you have.”

  “But it is only because you are here,” Maria told her, plumping the cushions on the sofa before sitting down. “You and Lord Watley. I have tried hard not to cling to either of you. Or to hide in your shadow. It has been tempting, for you are both so confident and poised in manner. But you cannot know the sense of relief I feel every time I see either one of you. You look … familiar. You look like friends. You give me courage even without a word spoken. I will never forget that you came here for my sake even though I strongly suspected you did not really want to come. I think perhaps you did it because you knew Melanie was leaving me.”

  “You had a letter from her this morning?” Estelle said.

  “Oh, yes,” Maria said. “I did not have a chance to read it until after luncheon. She is very busy helping with all the children. Her mother is not at all well after her last confinement. Oh, and Mr. Sheridan is still unmarried, and he has called at the house every second day since Melanie’s return— to see how her mother does.” She laughed.

  “Mr. Sheridan?” Estelle raised her eyebrows.

  “The gentleman farmer Melanie refused when she was eighteen,” Maria explained. “She thought he had asked out of pity then because her papa does not have a great fortune and there was already talk of her having to seek a position as a governess. But he has not married in the meanwhile, Estelle, and now he is back.”

  “You think you smell a romance,” Estelle said, and they grinned at each other.

  “Even from this far away,” Maria said. “She says—”

  But Estelle was not to hear what Melanie Vane had said concerning Mr. Sheridan. A tap on the sitting room door preceded the arrival of the tea tray. It was Lord Brandon who had opened the door for the footman who carried it. He waited at the door to admit Bertrand and then close it after the footman left.

  None of them spoke while Bertrand came to sit beside Estelle on a love seat and Maria poured the tea. Lord Brandon, predictably, took up a stand before the fireplace, his back to it, his hands clasped behind him.

  “I will set your tea here,” Maria said without looking at her brother. She put his cup and saucer down on the small table beside an armchair close to him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She sat on the sofa and looked at him. “All the aunts and uncles— mine, yours, ours— remember you as a cheerful, kindly boy,” she said. “
It is how I remember you too, though you never seemed like a boy to me. You always seemed like a grown-up.”

  “That was all a long time ago,” he said.

  “Yes.” She picked up her own cup but changed her mind and set it back down on the saucer. “You have denied taking Mama’s jewelry. The Sharpes and our Ormsbury relatives believe you. So does Lady Maple, Great-aunt Bertha. None of them think it would have been in your nature to do such a thing. Uncle Peter, Lord Crowther, said it would have been unkind, even cruel, as well as dishonest, and he did not believe you to be capable of any of those three.”

  She looked at him briefly, but he made no comment.

  “I have not asked my own aunts and uncles, as they met you only briefly at Mama and Papa’s wedding,” Maria continued. “Though they all— except Uncle Irwin, who was not yet married to Aunt Patricia at the time— remember you as a kindhearted boy who went out of your way to make them feel welcome here.”

  “But what do you believe, Maria?” Lord Brandon asked.

  “If it was not theft, then what was it?” she cried in a sudden passion. “What happened, Brandon? I want to know the truth. I need to know. I have observed you yesterday and today, distraught over the disappearance of someone most men of your rank would not even notice, any more than they would a worm at their feet, let alone care about and get upset over. I have seen that you care deeply, both for him and for his brother and the woman with whom he lives, presumably not his wedded wife. I have seen you willing to bare your soul to all the relatives and neighbors. Even to the servants. All for the sake of a man with the mind of a child and for that of his relatives, who are frantic because he is missing. You have been behaving, in fact, as I would have expected you to do all those years ago. You have been behaving like a man of conscience and kindness.”

  There was a silence none of them seemed prepared to break.

  “But there was that theft and its consequences,” Maria said at last. “And I want you to tell me what happened. I want you to tell Viscount Watley and Lady Estelle so there can be no chance of any misunderstanding between the two of us. Tell me.”

  He inhaled deeply and let the breath out with a ragged sigh. “It was something very personal between my father and me, Maria,” he said. “It had nothing to do with—”

  “No!” She cut him off, and her eyes were flashing. “That is not good enough, Brandon. Papa was my father too. He was not your father. He was ours. You were my brother. Whatever it was that happened, it concerned my mother. I was only eight years old at the time. I understand why no one explained to me immediately what had happened. I was a child. But I am twenty years old now and can no longer be shut out of knowing what happened to my family. Something did, and it broke everything apart. Even my childhood self knew that.”

  He sighed again. “I was playing with you that morning,” he said. “Hide-and-seek. It was always one of your favorites, though you could never keep quiet when I was drawing close to your hiding place. You would start to giggle and I would pretend not to know from where the sounds were coming. Then you would burst out into the open just as I was about to pounce and run away, shrieking, while I took my time about chasing you down. It was all part of the game.” He sighed. “On that particular morning you dashed into your mother’s room, and after a few moments I dashed in there too— without knocking. I had seen your mother not long before at the escritoire in the morning room, reading a letter and preparing to answer it. But … she was in her room after all. You were not. You had darted into her dressing room and back out into the corridor and away, I suppose. I was horribly embarrassed and apologized profusely and would have left the way I had come without further delay, but our father came through from his dressing room and saw me there and was furiously angry that I had intruded upon your mother’s privacy without even knocking. He sent me down to the library and followed me there. He said my behavior was inexcusable, and he … sent me away.”

  The Earl of Brandon, Estelle thought as the silence following his words lengthened, was not a convincing liar.

  Maria had moved to the edge of her seat and was gazing incredulously at him. “You expect me to believe that Papa, who had always so openly adored you, banished you and never relented for the rest of his life because you had committed the indiscretion of chasing after me and bursting in upon Mama without first knocking on her door?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said after a pause. “It is what happened.”

  It probably was what had happened, Estelle thought. It was undoubtedly not all that had happened, however.

  Her hands were pressed flat against the cushions on either side of her. Bertrand’s hand came down to cover one of hers, and she leaned her shoulder against his. They did not turn their heads to look at each other. They did not need to. They were feeling the same things, and they were taking comfort from each other. Or, more accurately, Bertrand was giving comfort and Estelle was taking it. She felt a bit nauseated.

  “I believe you are lying,” Maria said. Her voice was shaking.

  He nodded slowly without saying anything. He was gazing at her, his eyes dark and bleak.

  He would have been twenty-two at the time, Estelle thought. His stepmother had been seventeen to his thirteen when she married his father. She was twenty-six by this time, then. And still very beautiful, no doubt. Perhaps more so than she had been at seventeen. Perhaps irresistibly attractive to her stepson. He must have been a handsome young man, slighter of build than he was now, more open of countenance, his nose unbroken. A cheerful and kindly young man, according to his relatives. Adored by his father and by his young half sister. Irresistibly attractive, perhaps, to his father’s young vain wife, who might have grown bored and restless with her older husband.

  Who had seduced whom? Or had it been mutual?

  “I do not believe you,” Maria said again. “Papa would have given you a thundering scold, even though it would have been mainly my fault really. But he would not have banished you. Or never let you come back home. That story does not even make sense.”

  He continued simply to gaze at her while Bertrand clasped Estelle’s hand tightly in his own.

  “I was an idle, careless young man in those days,” Lord Brandon said. “It did me good to be sent off to cool my heels, though what was intended as a brief sort of punishment for careless behavior stretched into six years. I was too busy exploring the country and enjoying myself to come home. Unfortunately I left it too long. I hope our father forgave me for that before he died.”

  When a first lie was unconvincing, a second rarely improved upon it.

  “He spent more time with me after you left,” she said. “He smiled more. He was sadder. It was strange how both those things happened. He was always so very sad, and always smiling and smiling. Everything was broken. You took those jewels, Brandon. And now you add lies to theft. Mama’s heart was broken. She loved those jewels, but I never saw them again after you went away. They were gone.”

  The Earl of Brandon tipped back his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them he was looking at her, Estelle. And at Bertrand.

  “I am sorry you have been exposed to the discomfort of this conversation,” he said. “At the same time, I thank you for giving my sister the comfort of your friendship. She is very young to have lost both her mother and her father and to have been left with only a half brother she does not trust.”

  “I have aunts and uncles and cousins too,” Maria said.

  “Yes.” He looked at her with such desperate fondness that Estelle had to turn her eyes away.

  “Both of you can rest assured that what has been said here will be safe with Estelle and me,” Bertrand said. “It has been our pleasure to be here at Everleigh. Your family reminds me a bit of our own— large and diverse, blood relatives and those more loosely related by ties of marriage. But all happy to mingle with one another and to offer support and help wherever it is needed. And affection. Such bonds never break, even when sometimes they are stretched almost to a
breaking point.”

  Estelle squeezed his hand and they both got to their feet.

  “Shall we join your family in the drawing room, Maria?” Estelle suggested. None of them, she noticed, had touched their tea.

  They led the way out, leaving the men to follow them.

  “I so desperately want to believe in him,” Maria said. “I doted upon him when I was a child. I cannot remember him ever being impatient with me or unwilling to play with me. And last night and today I have seen the old Justin in him and want to believe that at heart he has never changed or been cruel or dishonest— or a liar. But the story he told when I begged him to tell me the truth was just ridiculous.”

  Yes, Estelle thought. He was kind and caring at heart. He had loved his father and his half sister. Theft would have been out of character. So would seduction of his father’s wife, of Maria’s mother. Oh, it would not have been that way around. Everything she had heard about the late countess, however, had revealed a woman of vanity and ambition and little conscience. His only sin, surely, was in not telling his father the truth but taking the blame upon himself so that he would not hurt his father beyond bearing. Though perhaps he had done that after all.

  “I so want to love him again,” Maria said. “If he would just tell me the truth.”

  “I am very certain he loves you,” Estelle said.

  Two days went by during which nothing of any great significance happened except that Justin received another letter from Hilda. She was at home alone. Ricky was still missing and now Wes had gone too, to search for him. It was madness, Hilda had written, for neither they nor anyone else had any idea where Ricky had gone— if he had gone anywhere. Perhaps he had drowned somewhere, she had written with stark frankness— and Justin could only imagine the terror behind that admission. But Wes had had to believe that Ricky was trying to find his way to Everleigh Park and that somehow he was headed in the right direction. Wes had accepted the loan of a horse from the owner of the quarry—“Everyone has been awfully kind, Juss. People are even bringing food to the house as though I had suddenly forgotten how to cook”— and a loan equivalent to a month’s wages, though the owner was insisting that Wes did not have to pay it back. And he had set off to find his brother.